CLEARING YOUR MASH - TIPS AND DEMONSTRATION

well welcome back to barley and hops I'm George yes I am your humble host and excited to be here with you as always our intent is to unlock the mysteries of home distilling and we're here to help unlock one more you're going to enjoy this we're going to talk about clarification now that you've made it through the introduction and our quick title we want to get right to the meat of what we're gonna do today we're going to talk about clarification because we all know that once we create a mash or a wash those terms are interchangeable you can use them however you like a wash is primarily sugar water and a mash which is a noun as well as a process verb something you're doing is really more reserved for grains cereals and water okay but the terms are interchangeable people know what you're talking about as long as you know what you're talking about that's all we care about so let's move on you know that the clearer and cleaner that you enter the still the clearer and cleaner you will exit the still which is our way of trying to avoid yep scorching and you can scorch regardless of what type of heat source you use but when you have a lot of solid particulates and a bunch of stuff going around in there and you're not keeping it moving which would require an agitator there are stills that that our oil jacketed that heat collectively from across the outside and I'm getting off track here but they also have an agitator that keeps everything moving that you can actually have the green inside the still and distill in that manner but most of us are using direct heated or direct fired stills and in that particular case anything you put in there any solid particulars are going to settle and when they settle and touch the source of your heat what do they do yes they do they burn which is called scorching and that really does create a nasty taste that will make its way throughout your spirit and we don't want that to happen so what we want to do is we want to clarify and this is the step after fermentation now remember before you do any clarification the one thing you need to do after fermentation and you have validated and verified that fermentation has completed before you go to your clarifying step what do we have to do yep no yeah you in the back get with the program we have to dig ass why do we do gas we do gas so that all of the co2 that's resident inside here because what happens during fermentation is that one of the byproducts of your yeast creating alcohol is they sort of pass out co2 and that co2 will start to lock itself with some of those water molecules and it'll become trapped and over a period of time it builds up and it's like it's like having a coke you know or a sprite is an easy one you put sprite Porton in a glass and sit back and watch it you'll see co2 escaping it won't it trust me it doesn't want to be in there in the first place so it's trying to get out and it'll just it'll rise up to the top and pop off well what will happen in your wash or your mash is that it'll start to rise but it gets captured and so you'll have all the co2 floating around in there what happens whenever you try to clarify anything you used to clarify will be captured by that floating co2 so you'll start having layers and or you'll have no clarification whatsoever so make sure you DJ ADA gas a couple of different ways in this particular case with these jars and these may be familiar I use these on a video d we did four and that's the very same ones that we did for a qualm using sugar and verifying how much sugar goes into you know points per gallon per pound points per pound per gallon gravity points per pound per gallon and there we go yeah something using the same once the easiest way to get rid of that co2 and those was just shake them real hard and open the top close it shake it real hard open the top you know let it let all of it escape close it until you get all the co2 out you can also use a drill with a whip on the end of it you can open up the top of your fermenter you can use a big whisk and you can just start whipping but you need to have find a way to get rid of all that co2 with me so far we're there ok so we have D gas now what we want to do is we want to remove and we want everything in there to drop out to the bottom one of the methods we can use well the very first one is the one that's always works in our favor and it's natural it's called gravity yes over a period of about two weeks and sometimes maybe three weeks depending on the amount and the size gravity will cause all of your solid particulates to settle down to the bottom okay and it will leave you with a clear mash or wash oh that's one way but of course any time we do something we're always looking for an easier way to do it or a method in which to get there a little bit quicker so we use what we call fining agents and these finding agents are are plentiful okay a couple that I don't have with me one time is bentonite bentonite is really a clay but it's a really good clay and it's really really compact and small crushed and what this clay does is it absorbs water first it expands and it starts to drop because it's a it's very heavy um it has a really high molecular mass so it drops it when it does it captures particles and it drops down to the bottom so that's bentonite the bentonite does that very well it's not really messy to use but it works extremely well I just don't have to have any because I don't normally use it it's really popular in wines now we have another top product called spark lloyd as spark reward is a white powder and you use that you mix it up with a little bit of water and you make a slurry out of it and pour that in and it does exactly the same thing it's just sold under the name sparkle oyd of course we have well my favorite which is the turbo clear and the turbo clear is well also you have instant glass insta glass is an extract from a dried fish bladder and it's primarily used in beer brewing and you just add that to your mash and voila things settle down to the bottom the one my favorite is a Kia Saul and cheetah saying and it's made in turbo clear and we'll get to that now we'll do that right now it's a two-part you have part a yeah part b excuse me part a is one out it's okay we're going to talk about a six gallon batch okay is this is good for up to six gallons part a is 20 milliliters or 0.7 else's and Part B is right at 85 or so milliliters which is three ounces so yep piece/pieces Saul and cheeto saying and these are positively negatively charged and they are made from extracts from shellfish so well although if you have a shellfish allergy this should not affect that at all it's an extract and additionally if you're gonna use this you can also buy it in the large bottles and just it's it's a lot more economic if you just buy big bottles of it and here's the name thesis all and cheater saying or China saying however you want to pronounce it but these are the two chemicals that you use together you use part a and then you wait 45 minutes or so and then you put in Part B and within 24 to 48 hours everything drops down to the bottom and you're crystal clear everybody doesn't have access to that and oh by the way remember this is a 1 to 3 ratio key so salt is 1 ounce 0.7 is close enough 1 ounce and chitosan is three ounces so that is your one to three ratio when you use those two chemicals together now in these three jars I have in front of me I wanted to show this to you because this is another solution other than what we've already discussed this is a one of one pound of sugar in one gallon of water equivalent okay that we did earlier you'll notice that it's crystal clear it is already finished fermenting because this was over two weeks ago and I still got this jar sitting around so when I open it up it smells like alcohol it's got about four percent alcohol by volume and all of the co2 has escaped I shook it so all the co2 is escaping you can see it's crystal clear in for lack of better words this is a jar and it's still cold and that's why it's a little hazy because any time that you chill a fermented mash or wash those long-chain fatty acids will become visible and then when it warms up it will start to clear out and then I have this one here as well now these are two equivalence because remember we did an adjustment to these we added more water to them in order to bring down the levels of sugar so we could work with our points gravity points per pound per gallon or actually yeah that's what it was so we got these about equivalent but that's not what we were interested in we're I was interested in the clarification process so I degassed both of them a simple shake several times to get all the co2 out and then what I did was I introduced another product in I'm going to show you this and now there's a guide intact sitting there right now going boom I got it he's gonna shut the video off and from now on he's going to use jello and you're gonna be rudely you're already gone so it doesn't matter they'll be rudely disappointed because I'm showing this I'm holding this up as an example of what not to use okay gelatin is what we're looking for jello is jealous but remember that there's 32 grams of sugar in here as well so what's going to happen if I add jello to any one of these you better believe it I've already got yeast in there because you can't get rid of that and I'm gonna feed them again and guess what they're gonna do yep they're gonna start fermenting and and guess what the byproducts are aside from the ethanol is gonna be co2 that you've already shook out and try to get rid of so you could clarify it you've taken three steps backwards all right so do not use your flavored jello because it already has some of them at 30 to some have 39 grams of sugar already added to it and it's just not a good product for what we're looking for they have a product called unflavored gelatin which is has 0 grams of fat 0 grams of protein 0 grams of sugar it's nothing more than just gelatin and this will work in a pinch but there's two ways to use it and I wanted to show you this because this is the demonstration this is an example of what I have as the results of what we went through now this comes in a small box this cost me 89 cents at my local Walmart here's another ones made by knocks knocks makes a gelatin as well and they're made by many many different names so choose the one you want as long as it's unflavored and not sugared you can bet your bottom dollar if it's unflavored it doesn't have any sugar in it because the it's that's just the way it is you get four little packs inside there and these are this is a seven gram pack so you've got a total of four one quarter ounce or seven gram satchels in here and I used one in this jar and I used one in this jar four of these is more than enough actually two of these will probably do you're really good at a five gallon batch the way I use this was the right way the right method and I also used the printed instructions method which is something what men normally do is you know read the instructions when all else fails then you read the instructions so follow along what I did was I opened up this jar and I sprinkled the gelatin on top and just allowed it to sit there and then I closed the jar and I allowed that gelatin to soak up all that water and become a glob well that glob did exactly what I had expected it to do it fills up and it started to drop and it dropped all the way down to the bottom and you'll notice you can see the level of sediment that I have here because that's two things one it's all the things that it drug out and settled down to the bottom but additionally it's a big glob of gelatin which can be problematic just think of this in the long term down the road if I have that much in this small quart jar can you imagine what that's going to do to my fermenter I'm actually sacrificing a pretty large space because what I don't want to do is I don't want to siphon this out and put this into the still for obvious reasons okay now what I did with this one is I did it the correct way which is I took a half a cup of water I followed the direction that's all I had to do poured this in stirred it let it set for about two minutes and then I introduced a half a cup of hot water actually boiling water in there and what it does is it gets the gelatin to start to liquefy and gets it set up in its proper form so that they can work in your favor and then I just introduce that I added that to this jar and close the jar and allow that to set if you look at this one look closely and you can see way way at the very bottom here I've probably got about oh maybe an eighth of an inch I can see if you look really close I can see about Oh an eighth to a quarter of an inch of gelatin and it's sitting down on top of all that sediment so everything and it drug out it drug out all the way down and so this is clear all I have to do a siphon things off the top so remember you can use gelatin make sure you use unflavored gelatin or you can use the case of salt cheetah saying you can use a sparkle oeid you can use bentonite there's one other methods called cult crashing um and when you cold crash and of course these two I put them in the refrigerator because according to the instructions you have to chill it in order for that to solidify and then it's heavy and it falls and that's why you can see some of the fatty acids that are still located in there you can also do what we call cold crashing if you have a device large enough like a chest freezer you can put a large five-gallon fermenter into a chest freezer and you can cold crash it because what happens there is that the temperature causes your all of your acids all your fatty acids to solidify clump together they become heavy they drop everything else and it pulls everything else with it so that's one way of clarifying that can take anywhere from 24 to 36 hours there is simple and very direct so I hope you've enjoyed this part now there's one other thing that I want to discuss before we go away I wanted to share this week because I get so many messages about hand sanitizer folks when we make hand sanitizer we know what the recommendation is for the level of alcohol by volume in the final product okay and that's sixty percent or higher sixty percent alcohol by volume or higher in your final product hand sanitizer so that means that you have to produce out of your still you're going to have to produce a minimum if you were going to use it at 100 percent strength you're gonna have to produce 120 proof we produce normally a hundred and forty proof in a pot still and that's a pretty good draw but sometimes it's a little a bit lower than that so a pot still is not the solution for making ethanol to make hand sanitizer it really requires a certain amount of what they call rectification or reflux because the higher the proof you start with of course the more median medium you can put it the aloe gel or the glycerin or baby oil or the more of that you can add to it in order to help use that to spread that around if you use a pure ethanol ethanol will evaporate too quickly and becomes non effective it'll also dry your skin out I hope that clarifies that because that those questions are coming in dozens at a time and I understand but we've got to do this if we're going to do it we've got to do it right happy distilling

Channel: Barley and Hops Brewing

Views: 110,365

Keywords: neutral spirit, sugar wash, barlerandhops, hops, home, Sugar (Ingredient), sugar mash, distilling, barley, corn sugar vs cane sugar, corn sugar mash recipe, making a wash for distilling, running a still for the first time, first distillation, using yeast, mooshine, whiskey, making rum, making vodka, bourbon, baby step bourbon, making bourbon at home

Id: GPDT5SRZdE4

Length: 18min 42sec (1122 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 10 2020